Robert Mackey at the New York Times seems to have fallen in love with vlogs, or at least lured into an infatuation with one vlogger, Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom. His cogent, longish piece in today’s Times recaps Rocketboom and points out that this increasingly popular site is cheap to run and a potential goldmine to boot.
Amanda Congdon’s three-minute mock news report costs $20 per day to produce, but could possibly generate (according to estimates by Jeff Jarvis)$8,000 a day in advertising. My guess is that $8,000/day ain’t going to happen any time soon, but the point is well-taken: web-based short videos, if well done, could make tons of money with little upfront costs. This is the classic long tail in action.
Mackey drives home this point by citing the example of Charlene Rule at Scratch Video.
A site like Ms. Rule’s Scratch Video, which has about 8,000 subscribers, suggests that it may soon be possible for video producers to distribute their programs directly through the Internet - and possibly even make a living doing it, in much the same way novelists with small but loyal followings can build a career without ever cracking the best-seller list. Until now, both the television and film industries have been built on a model that requires producers to appeal to millions of people or be considered failures. If Amanda Congdon at one end of the spectrum and Charlene Rule at the other continue to add viewers at the rate they’re going, they and the best of the other vloggers might just provide a viable alternative to that lowest-common-denominator business model.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:37 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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